Barbara Carter is a Nova Scotia artist and writer. Her textile-based pieces and mixed media work often incorporate symbolism, texture, and storytelling, reflecting a lifelong commitment to creative expression. Alongside her art practice, Carter writes memoir and personal essays that examine family, healing, and self-discovery. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and featured in publications, offering an honest, deeply human perspective that invites connection, reflection, and understanding.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The Woman I Kept Becoming
A Memoir of Art, Trauma, and Transformation
Barbara Carter spent much of her life becoming who others needed her to be—daughter, wife, mother, caregiver, artist, survivor. Yet beneath those shifting roles, another self quietly waited to emerge.
What began as a young woman's search to become an artist gradually became a deeper search to understand herself. Through fabric, paint, collage, and mixed media, Barbara followed an intuitive creative path that led far beyond technique. Again and again, her artwork revealed truths she did not yet consciously understand.
Looking back across decades of childhood trauma, marriage, motherhood, and healing, she discovers that her art had been telling her story long before she had the words to tell it herself.
Each body of work became another step toward wholeness, revealing the quiet wisdom of intuition and the remarkable ways creativity can illuminate what the heart already knows.
Part artist's journey, part emotional reckoning, and part testament to resilience, The Woman I Kept Becoming is an intimate memoir about identity, creativity, and the lifelong process of becoming ourselves.